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Heraldic Needlepoint, Strike Two: DEATH METAL BEER STEIN

I blogged recently about taking my friend Kenn Munk‘s whimsical “Barcode Griffins” design, and turning it into something that looks like it would be on the cover of the condom packets sold in the men’s room of a Lederhosen factory. I mean, it was a pretty powerful effect, and not ineffective… but not really something, you know, that I was necessarily going for.

While browsing Kenn’s store, I suddenly realized that the barcode griffins were not a one-off, but just one permutation of a WHOLE ENTIRE FONT SYSTEM for making little tiny heraldic designs. The font is called Wappenbee, and you can check it out on MyFonts. Vowels make the mythical shield-holding beasts (upper- and lower-case for right- and left-facing), consonants for the shields, and numbers for the shield crests. It is an AWESOME font.

Lydia and I played around with it, and Lydia picked out Pegasi (“O o”), a hamster (“h”), and the bone (9). Here’s “Oh9o” in Wappanbee font, which Lydia was very happy with:

I decided to stitch it up as another needlepoint two-inch-tall “twinchy”, and at first, as you can see on TwitPic, it started out very nice.

But then I decided that the hamster looked an awful lot like Tikaro (Tikaro himself; the red stuffed pig that my aunt Sylvia made for me when I was a baby), and I decided to stitch in the hamster in red. And then I thought I’d outline the design in the same red, to separate it from the background:

It turns out that heraldic needlepoint is pretty strong stuff. And heraldic needlepoint when combined with shiny, flame-red pearl cotton? Pretty much looks like a Death Metal Beer Stein.

Once again; I’m not really saying it looks BAD; I’m pretty sure that you could cut this canvas out, attach it to one of those blue denim three-ring notebooks from junior high, and make the METALLEST TRAPPER-KEEPER EVER out of it. There are worse things than that.

But It’s not what I was shooting for. Kenn, I’m sorry; I am cooking with powerful, powerful ingredients here, and I keep making strong, strong dishes. Maybe the third try will be the charm.

Meanwhile, Lydia is perfectly content with it. Maybe I will buy her a little denim jacket and sew this onto the back?

Ok, champ. Here’s the deal–if you persist in choosing Death Knight Black and Bloody Red Blood colors for your projects, you are definitely going to end up with projects that scream Heavy Metal Madness. Squint at the lovely font design and pretend that you used pink and lavender instead and you’ll start to get the idea. Switch the colors mentally to gold metallic on royal blue and it’ll be different again.
Plus you aren’t shading. Look at these little 2×3 inch beauties. THey are probably about the size of your heraldic piece but the shading makes them much less strong and chest-beating.http://www.sharong.com/catalog/mb/index.html
Color is hard–don’t get me wrong–so this stuff isn’t exactly obvious but if you want something more delicate, use delicate colors and shade a bit more. Attempt #3 might be closer to what you expected.
Jane, waving from Chilly Hollow where there is ice everywhere (rats)